For this reading, it is "all about love."
Historically, Valentine's day is a confusion of pagan ritual, Roman debauchery (which involved alcohol, spanking and coupling; not necessarily in that order), official beheadings, the industrialized Hallmark Valentine Card (circa 1913) and today's staple SAD (Single's Awareness Day) celebration. It is somehow also associated with sacrificing goats and dogs; a flying infant armed with a bow and arrow ready to "shoot" love into the eyeball of some random passerby; red roses, a symbol that simultaneously points to innocence and (no pun intended) deflowering; and, finally, those sassy sweat tart-hearts that tell you to "kiss me" and, just as you think things could end well: "as if."
Love stories told in poetry and prose this month @ Literary Arts & Wine.
This reading features the work of:
Kelsay Elizabeth Myers
is an experimental hybrid essayist, theorist, emerging curator and found object/mixed media artist. She has dual MFAs in Creative Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California in Nonfiction and Poetry and is currently a PhD student in Transformative Studies at California Institute of Integral Studies. She is also Chair of the St. Mary's MFA in Creative Program Advisory Board. She is drawn to material objects, states of being, people and symbols that represent ideas and concepts which compose larger themes and structures. For her, art is lived expression. Recent work has appeared in White Stag's #psychologia, Waxwing, New Delta Review, Portland Review and the anthology, More Voices: A Collection of Works from Asian Adoptees (Koryo Press). | kelsayelizabethmyers.com
June Sylvester Sacaceno
is the author of two poetry collections Altars of Ordinary Light and Of Dirt and Tar, as well as a chapbook of prose poems Mean Girl Trips. She is English Program chair at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe.
Arian Katsimbras
was born and raised in Reno, Nevada, where he earned his BA from the University of Nevada-Reno. He has been the recipient of the Emily Morrison Prize in Poetry selected by Jamaal May, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Muzzle Magazine, Vinyl Poetry, Waxwing Literary Journal, Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, Tahoma Literary Review, and anthologized in It Was Written: Poetry Inspired By Hip Hop. He is a graduate of the MFA program at Virginia Tech and currently lives with his partner and son in Reno where he teaches English and serves as a poetry editor for The Meadow.
Colleen Morton Busch
is the author of Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire, named a best book of 2011 by Publisher’s Weekly and the San Francisco Chronicle.